Collaborative Active and Semisupervised Learning for Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Image Classification

Hyperspectral image classification is a challenging problem. Among existing approaches to addressing this problem, the active learning (AL) and semisupervised learning (SSL) techniques have attracted much attention in recent years. AL usually involves a labor-intensive human-labeling process while SSL, although avoiding human labeling by assigning pseudolabels to unlabeled data, may introduce incorrect pseudolabels and thus deteriorate classification performance. To overcome these drawbacks, a novel approach named collaborative active and semisupervised learning (CASSL) is proposed in this paper. CASSL combines AL and SSL to invoke a collaborative labeling process by both human experts and classifiers. Specifically, an AL-based pseudolabel verification procedure is performed for gradually improving the pseudolabeling accuracy to facilitate SSL. Meanwhile, only those unlabeled data with low pseudolabeling confidence in SSL will become the query candidates in AL. We evaluate the performance of CASSL on three hyperspectral data sets and compare it with that of two state-of-the-art hyperspectral image classification methods. Experimental results reveal the superiority of CASSL.